Man with a Conscience

There was this guy who had a pretty important legal position within the Bush Administration whose legal opinion was so important, he could only be overridden by the Attorney General or the President of the United States (being the client) which rarely ever happens because the person one would choose for this job is someone you know would be right about it at all times. The job is simply defined as advising the president of the limits of executive power, the Office of Legal Counsel.

Previous to this position he had a similar position in the Department of Defense where he wrote a memo telling Rumsfeld that the International Criminal Courts (ICC) could indict American officials for actions taken in the War on Terror. Coincidentally the ICC is reviewing a case charging Rumsfeld and others with war crimes.

The Bush Administration had some very important constitutional issues to discuss post 9/11 when implementing their so-called "War on Terror" such as warantless wire-tapping, civilian detainment, Geneva Conventions, defining torture as narrowly as possible, etc so his input was crucial to the process. He resigned in 2004 without much of an explanation to the media, but within the Bush Administration his maneuver was explanation enough that he cared more about the rule of law than pushing the neo-con agenda.

This guy is Jack Goldsmith who now teaches at Harvard Law. Word started getting around the faculty that he is one of the people responsible for drafting the "Torture Memo", the warrantless surveillance program, etc, then the faculty started talking to the press and he took great exception to that.

He wrote a book. It will be published this month.

This is the article about him. It will be in the September 9th issue of New York Times Magazine. It is seven pages but a good read because it's packed with very specific info about the battles he fought within the administration. I have selected passages but I highly recommend reading the whole article as it is very informative to the thinking behind the radical interpretations of law in fighting the War on Terror.

About his resignation maneuver:

No one was surprised when he was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11- debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.
Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. During his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith had discovered that the Office of Legal Counsel had written two legal opinions- both drafted by Goldsmith's friend Yoo, who served as a deputy in the office- about the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogations. Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the "torture memos," to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists. His efforts succeeded in bringing the Bush administration somewhat closer to what Goldsmith considered the rule of law- although at considerable cost to Goldsmith himself. By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. "I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted," he told me recently.

Jump to:

In December 2003, Goldsmith decided that he had to withdraw the March opinion- that is, he had to tell administration officials that they could no longer rely on it. "But figuring out how to withdraw it was very tricky," he told me, "since withdrawal would frighten everyone who relied on the opinions in a very sensitive area." In the past, the Office of Legal Counsel had occasionally changed its legal positions between presidential administrations to reflect different legal philosophies, but Goldsmith could find no precedent for the office withdrawing an opinion drafted earlier by the same administration- especially on a matter of such importance. Goldsmith concluded that he could immediately tell the Defense Department to stop relying on the March opinion, since he was confident that it was not needed to justify the 24 interrogation techniques the department was actually using, including two called "Fear Up Harsh" and "Pride and Ego Down," which were designed to make subjects nervous without crossing the line into coercion. But the withdrawal of the August opinion was a much harder call. The August opinion provided the legal foundation for the C.I.A.'s interrogation program, Goldsmith says, which he considered much closer to the legal line. (He refused to discuss the details of the program.)
Goldsmith, however, says he didn't have the time or resources to create a replacement opinion immediately. In his initial months on the job, his attention was focused on the more pressing matter of addressing legal issues surrounding the terrorist-surveillance program. In April 2004, however, Goldsmith's priorities were reversed when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. Then, in June of that year, Yoo's August 2002 opinion was leaked to the media. "After the leak, there was a lot of pressure on me within the administration to stand by the opinion," Goldsmith told me, "and the problem was that I had decided six months earlier that I couldn't stand by the opinion."
A week after the leak of Yoo's August 2002 memo, Goldsmith withdrew the opinion. Goldsmith made the decision himself, in consultation with Philbin and Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey, both of whom, Goldsmith says, agreed it was the right thing to do. He then told Ashcroft, who was, Goldsmith writes, "unbelievably magnanimous: it had happened on his watch, and he could have overruled me, and he didn't."
Goldsmith was concerned, however, that the White House might overrule him. So he made a strategic decision: on the same day that he withdrew the opinion, he submitted his resignation, effectively forcing the administration to choose between accepting his decision and letting him leave quietly, or rejecting it and turning his resignation into a big news story. "If the story had come out that the U.S. government decided to stick by the controversial opinions that led the head of the Office of Legal Counsel to resign, that would have looked bad," Goldsmith told me. "The timing was designed to ensure that the decision stuck."

Here's another choice excerpt from the article:

Goldsmith also witnessed perhaps the most well-known confrontation over the administration's aggressive tactics: the scene at Ashcroft's hospital bed on March 10, 2004, when Gonzales and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, visited the hospital to demand that the ailing Ashcroft approve, over Goldsmith and Comey's objections, a secret program that was about to expire. (Goldsmith refuses to identify the program, but Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, has publicly indicated it was the terrorist surveillance program.) As he recalled it to me, Goldsmith received a call in the evening from his deputy, Philbin, telling him to go to the George Washington University Hospital immediately, since Gonzales and Card were on the way there. Goldsmith raced to the hospital, double-parked outside and walked into a dark room. Ashcroft lay with a bright light shining on him and tubes and wires coming out of his body.
Suddenly, Gonzales and Card came in the room and announced that they were there in connection with the classified program. "Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest," Goldsmith recalls. "All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn't appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn't the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I've ever witnessed." After a bit of silence, Goldsmith told me, Gonzales thanked Ashcroft, and he and Card walked out of the room. "At that moment," Goldsmith recalled, "Mrs. Ashcroft, who obviously couldn't believe what she saw happening to her sick husband, looked at Gonzales and Card as they walked out of the room and stuck her tongue out at them. She had no idea what we were discussing, but this sweet-looking woman sticking out her tongue was the ultimate expression of disapproval. It captured the feeling in the room perfectly."

Goldsmith knew the responsibilities his position entailed and stood up for those responsibilities to the overreaching, hyper-secretive Bush Administration of which he was a part. I look forward to reading his book.